I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, honest..

Well not yet anyway!

Having Mark home has been a big culture shock, after 4 months being on my own with the kids, him being around is alot to readjust to - especially when he has OCD tendencies, and insists on tidying stuff away and throwing stuff out... I have no idea where alot of stuff is right now... Its a good job he is back to work this week, so at least I get a bit of time now that the kids are back at school, and that Tom is now at full time school - even if it is spent hunting for things Mark has "put away"...

But I have been creating stuff. Mark and I sat down to go through the 541 photos we took in New Zealand, to put some into normal photo albums, and then I got to play with the rest. We spent a day at Auckland Zoo, and Mark wasn't keen about putting photos of animals into a normal album, so I had lots of great animal photos to make a mini album with!

I used an idea that I saw Shimelle do on the Fiskars website - the book is made from 4 x 12 inch pieces of cardstock, held together at the top by a book ring. I used the Scrummy Stash cafe Scenic Route Metropolitan kit, and added a piece of white bazzill to make up the page numbers. I added rikrak to each page, and a journalling stamp from Autumn Leaves. The stamps on the front cover of the book came from New Zealand, a lovely map and a circular stamps which has New Zealand printed over and over in it. The title is American crafts cardstock stickers. The album is super quick to make up, as I didn't have to crop the photos at all - just use the 4x6 photos I already had.

Speaking of Shimelle, I have also signed up for her "Learn something new everday" online class. I saw it last year, but was wary of joining an online class, but after doing her "Journal your Christmas" last year, I had no hesitation in signing up this year. I made my own album/book for this class, using chipboard covered in white copier paper splodged with acrylic paints and ink. I am using another Scrummy Stash Cafe kit - the sassafrass lass Scrumptious kit - to do this project, mainly for the little owls on one of the papers, as I managed to encorporate it into my front cover! I inked Scenic Route chipboard letters and added Stickles for a bit of bling.

This was my first page. The 2nd of September is a very sombre affair around here, as it is the anniversary of 2 seperate Nimrod crashes - one 12 years ago, and one in 2006. Obviously the 2006 crash is still very prominent in our thoughts, as Mark lost 12 colleagues that day. I thought a photo of a poppy that grew in my garden was appropriate for this page - seeing as it is a flower that symbolises remembrance. I can't believe that a year has passed already.

This is the second page - Mark and his tidying frenzy over the weekend lead to me doing a tip run yesterday. And this is the "after" picture !! And now I have a happy husband again....